OLPC India/Nashik

Holy Mother School

Holy Mother School is an English medium school in Nashik, Maharashtra. We are a private school established in 2004 by Joshua and Heera Pritikin. My wife runs the school, and I funded it out of my own savings.

Heera's introduction: Teaching was something I was passionate about. Both of us thought of doing something for the society. We constructed a big building in India. There I started tutoring poor students who were not able to pass the matriculation exam. When I started teaching these students, I found that they were very weak in their basic concepts. I felt like I need to do something more significant in this area. I got the idea of starting an English medium school in Nasik, India. My husband helped me with money to build a school and procure the necessary materials. To run the school efficiently and to know more about schooling, I decided to apply for education studies at University of Oregon.

A small OLPC trial has begun as of July 2008. We are working on an Internet connection. We already have a machine to serve as a school server.

We would love to make the laptops child owned but

• There are 50 students in 1st grade and older.
• Students pay about 105 USD per year in tuition.

We purchased 15 laptops for 2008-2009. For 2009-2010, we are ordering another 10 laptops.

Our implementation is simplistic because we are not yet trying to achieve child ownership. The laptops are owned by the school. The children spend a few hours a week working with them. As the kids and parents become more comfortable with the laptops, we expect to move towards child ownership and closer integration into the curriculum.

We hope to save ourselves from disappointment by starting with low expectations.

Wish list:

• NCERT books are a good start, but they are just scans of the pages. We need books or activities better tailored to the laptop medium.
• Everybody is impressed by the speak activity. English, Hindi, or Marathi childrens' books which are integrated with text-to-speech would be fantastic, even if pronunciation is poor. I know people are working on this, but we need it ASAP.

Update 08 Mar 2009

Since we can't afford one laptop per child, we are planning to buy 1 USB key per student. The students will own the USB keys.

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  Children and staff

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  The first day with laptops

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  10 laptops are not enough

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  Unpacking

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  Unpacking

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  Playing

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  Teachers and students